12 May 2013
The majority of website visits on Google Analytics always appear to be between 0 to 10 seconds long. Here’s a brief explanation of why that is.
The real story
What happens in reality is that when a somebody visits your page, Google Analytics will drop a time-stamped cookie. Continue Reading

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This article fails to mention the officially supported way of getting a better understanding of bounce rate: Adjusted bounce rate. Add a line to your snippet, decide the proper length of time that should pass before its no longer a bounce, and there, no more bounce for users that are actually reading your content, but not visiting another page.

Thanks for the link. Adding that setTimeout line is certainly a bit easier and less likely to do something weird than tracking scrolling.

The article does say this:

“Another solution is to have a timeout loop in JavaScript that fires off an event to the Google Analytics event tracking API. This is a bit hacky and you’ll have to choose your event names wisely if you go down this road.”

I believe this amounts to pretty much exactly the setTimeout trick used in the Google Analytics blog post.